'Twitter's Secret Blacklists': Elon Musk reveals confidential information in Twitter Files Part 2

Elon Musk has released the second part of the Twitter Files showing how the platform blacklisted certain individual accounts. The details in part two have been reported by Bari Weiss, founder and editor of The Free Press.  

THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES PART TWO.

TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 9, 2022

According to Weiss, the new Twitter Files probe has uncovered that teams of Twitter staff construct blacklists, stop unwanted tweets from trending, and intentionally reduce the visibility of whole accounts or even trending topics, without notifying users.

Also read: 'Make everything public now': Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey takes on Elon Musk over Twitter Files

The 'Secret Group' at Twitter

The new Twitter Files investigation brings forth names of former top executives of the company including Head of Legal, Policy, and Trust, Vijaya Gadde, the Global Head of Trust & Safety, Yoel Roth and even former CEOs Parag Agrawal and Jack Dorsey. Weiss claims they constituted a 'secret group' that was beyond the reach of moderators and the standard ticketing process to deal with policy violations.

Weiss claimed that this is where the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions got made. A Twitter employee has also been quoted saying, that these were high follower accounts and “there would be no ticket or anything.”

Weiss also shared screenshots of how various accounts were labeled internally, in order to limit their reach on Twitter. These accounts belonged to conservative, right-wing individuals like talk show host Dan Bongino, and Stanford University’s anti-COVID lockdown advocate Dr Jay Bhattacharya. 

Shadow Banning or 'Verified Filtering'

Weiss also spoke about the culture of 'shadow-banning' on Twitter. The platform has always denied the existence of shadow bans on Twitter but Weiss claims that it was just a change in terminology. The term Twitter used instead was Visibility Filtering. 

Using Visibility Filtering, Twitter tried to block searches for individual accounts which limited the reach of that individual's tweets and updates. Weiss also blamed Twitter for blocking select users’ posts from appearing on the “trending" page.